We’ve been running Customer Journey Mapping/Customer Experience Mapping workshops for almost 30 years! There is nobody with more experience doing this work today. We call them Customer Scenario Maps. They depict your customers’ ideal experiences for getting things done. They are role-based. They are context-based. In order to create ...

We recently led a very successful patient-centric co-design session for a small health center in rural, coastal Maine. The issue: this region is a hotbed of tick-borne diseases. There are many people who suffer from chronic lyme along with co-infections from the other tick-borne diseases. These are hard to diagnose ...

We used a new Evaluation Framework for our latest Product Evaluation Report, which is about Salesforce Service Cloud. We introduced the new Framework to make our reports shorter and more easily actionable. Shorter for sure, our previous report on Service Cloud was 57 pages including illustrations. This one is 16 ...

Here's an interesting and timely article in Ars Technica posted by David Kravets about the battle between Microsoft and the US government over customers' emails and whether or not the US government has the right to surveil emails that are housed in Microsoft's Irish datacenters. Does US have right to ...

We recently published “Virtual Assistant Update.” It’s a broad and not too deep update on virtual assistant technologies, products, suppliers, and markets from the perspective of the five leading suppliers: [24]7, Creative Virtual, IBM, Next IT, and Nuance. These are the leaders because they: Have been in the virtual assistant ...

My initial reaction to Amazon's planned acquisition of Whole Foods grocery store chain was "of course." Amazon wants to be a player in our everyday lives. What better way to cement our reliance on Amazon.com for everything we need than to hook up with the top of the line grocery ...

Consumer trust in government institutions is at an all time low in the U.S.. Consumer concern over the economy and the environment remain heightened. As major cultural, political, and economic transitions are afoot on the national and global stage, many people are turning inward: focusing on their local communities, their ...

President-Elect Donald Trump's Tweets were interesting during his candidacy, but now that he is President-Elect, they have taken on new meaning. Now Trump is setting national policy with his tweets and nobody knows what to do about it. This will be the first US President who uses Twitter as his ...

In our more than 10 years of customer service research, publishing, and consulting, we’d never before published a report about a Microsoft offering. It’s not because Microsoft hasn’t had a customer service offering, or that the company hasn’t had success in business applications. Since 2003, its CRM suite has always ...

How refreshing! I finally found an organization that does online customer service right. GoFundMe promises to reply to customer service emails within 5 minutes. And, they deliver! To be sure, the company starts by walking you through the usual customer service process: Search for a solution to your problem in ...

I have long been a fan of anonymous tracking versus personalized tracking. As long as my Internet activities are aggregated with those of others and kept anonymous, I don't really mind the information about where I go and what I look at being used to improve my experience by presenting ...

Apple Computer has been accused by the European Union of dodging $14.5 billion in taxes the EU claimes are owed to Ireland. The way this news has been handled by the media is quite damaging to Apple's brand. Apple is not alone in excelling in dodging corporate income taxes in ...

I like the thoughtfulness of this article, recently published in Nature: Stop the Privatization of Health Data, by John Wilbanks and Eric Topol. I have culled a few highlights to give you a flavor: Selected Excerpts below: "Until now, obtaining health data has generally depended on highly skilled professionals who ...

On June 29th, at Vice President Biden’s National Cancer Moonshot Summit, the U.S. Veterans Administration and IBM Watson Health announced a public-private partnership to help doctors expand and scale access to precision medicine over the next two years for 10,000 American Veterans with cancer. Here's the write up from the ...

As a follow up to our coverage of Precision Medicine--the ultimate application of personalized services--there's progress to report on the ability for more clinicians and patients to benefit from targeted analysis, diagnosis and treatment of cancer by accessing a shared database of Cancer Genomes. This is part of Obama's Precision ...

In the aftermath of the Orlando Mass Shooting, there are the usual feeble attempts to strengthen legislation to control the sale of assault weapons in the U.S. Why can't the people in this country make it clear that we are devastated by the rampant gun violence: mass shootings, school shootings, ...

My heart sank when I read that Linked In and Microsoft would be merging. "Another tool I'll no longer use," was my initial reaction. Why? Because of the big brother factor. For some non-logical reason, I am OK with LinkedIn "knowing" whom I know, but not OK with Microsoft doing ...

We recently published our Product Evaluation Report on Desk.com, Salesforce’s customer service offering for small and mid-sized businesses. “Desk” is a very attractive offering with broad and deep capabilities. It earns good grades on our Customer Service Report Card, including Exceeds Requirements grades in Knowledge Management, Customer Service Integration, and ...

I grew up in a college town. Swarthmore College worked hard to maintain good relations with the people who lived and worked in Swarthmore, PA. But nobody from the College conferred with local residents about the design of on campus buildings. I imagine the architects involved in the design of ...

Apologies to Ray Parker Jr. While your question or a problem may not be about ridding your neighborhood of ghosts, “Who You Gonna Call” to get the answer or solution that you need? Getting help on the Internet or on your mobile device is easy—type it into the search box ...